Up In Smoke: Sha’Carri Richardson’s suspension for cannabis and the fight against doping

It won’t help you win a gold medal, but the biggest danger cannabis poses is that it is illegal, according to the World Anti-Doping Agency.

“People don’t understand what it’s like to… step in front of the world, put on a face and hide my pain,” Sha’Carri Richardson said in an interview with Today. When a reporter inappropriately informed Richardson of her mother’s death during an interview, the 21-year-old American athlete said she was in a state of emotional panic.

Richardson admitted that in Oregon, a state where cannabis is legal, he used cannabis for the Olympic trials to cope with trauma. After a positive THC test, the US Anti-Doping Agency announced a one-month ban on Friday. Richardson’s penalty is the minimum penalty if an athlete can demonstrate that cannabis use was unrelated to the sport.

Many well-known sports leagues such as the NFL, UFC and NHL have stopped punishing cannabis use. In particular, the NFL formed a Pain Management Committee with a $ 1 million commitment to research cannabis for the treatment of chronic pain. Still, few experts believe that cannabis improves athletic performance. Why the World Anti-Doping Agency continues to ban cannabis as a substance of abuse alongside cocaine, heroin and MDMA remains a by-product of the drug war and ultimately the racism that built it.

Anti-doping policy is based on racism and whims

From record breaking times to her iconic technicolor hair and acrylic nails, Sha’Carri Richardson is magnetic. The attention the aspiring track and field athlete draws is literally both positive and negative. Likewise, the cannabis ban discussion is a political minefield, which, as MP Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter, is rooted in the “systematic racism that has long been driving anti-marijuana laws”.

“[It started with] a president who wanted to arrest black, brown and Jewish agitators, ”said Matt Stang, CEO of Delic and former High Times mogul. “He was going to ambush Abbie Rosen and Bobby Carmichael. He was deliberately trying to ambush them because he was fighting his management, and the only way to do that was to criminalize something they were doing. “

Today Olympic bodies and national doping authorities around the world enforce the 184-page World Anti-Doping Code. It’s a revolving door to a few hundred banned substances, from steroids to stimulants to recreational drugs. This included caffeine until 2004. Prohibited substances must meet one of three criteria: they have the potential or the proven ability to improve performance, the potential to harm an athlete, or the use is considered “against the spirit of sport”.

This last clause is as worryingly vague as it sounds. WADA defines “the spirit of sport” with nothing more than a series of valuable words such as “courage”. Also, there are only vague explanations as to which three criteria these prohibited substances violate – with one notable exception for cannabis, which apparently violates all three.

It is considered performance enhancing because it can reduce anxiety and improve oxygenation and concentration. Considered a health risk because it can lead to “decreased cognitive performance” and most importantly it offends the “spirit of sport” by drumming “negative reactions from the public, sponsors and media” – the greatest danger of cannabis, according to WADA, just illegal.

The exclusion criteria for cannabis only show how criminalization by government agencies drives consumption as a prohibited substance rather than as an alleged potential to improve performance. When 50 percent of WADA’s stakeholders are governments, the picture becomes crystal clear.

The war on drugs is a war on doping

After thirty years at the forefront of the sport of war on drugs, Doug Logan retired in the early 2010s. Logan realized that the anti-doping movement was a war with few wins. “This is a war that we haven’t won, cannot win, and shouldn’t be a part of,” he said in an interview with Vice.

“This is a war that we have not won, cannot win, and should not be a part of”

Doug Logan

Doping is as old as the Olympic Games themselves. Even older than the ancient Greek Olympic athletes who chewed on raw testicles to improve their performance. A year-long investigation by the Australian Criminal Police Commission into performance enhancers in professional sport found athletes bypassing the WADA Prohibited List on everything from calf blood extracts and pig brain to designer drugs that are still in clinical trials.

The reality is that drug testing isn’t very effective in the first place. Of 270,000 doping tests by WADA-accredited laboratories worldwide in 2012, only one percent tested positive for prohibited substances. However, no one believes the numbers for doping are anywhere near this low. BALCO, the 2016 Russian scandal, Alberto Salazar, Armstrong, and the Tour de France in the 1990s were all exposed by a combination of whistleblowers or law enforcement agencies, not drug testing.

The fight against anti-doping is, at least in part, an extension of the larger fight against drugs. The effectiveness of WADA as a global entity does not lie in punishing athletes for doping, but in public relations. Performance enhancers are good PR when they boost national morale, not so much when they become a scandal.

Performance enhancers are good PR when they boost national morale, not so much when they become a scandal.

“World record” by Yoshiaki Kawajiri on The Animatrix

The legal pre-workout connection of today is the doping bust of tomorrow, ending the career. The American sprinter Phil Derosier knows this more than anyone else. A failed doping test cost Derosier a six-month ban and most of his sponsorship income. The offensive substance? A legal dietary supplement containing methylhexanamine, a stimulant that has been removed from the WADA label and list of prohibited substances. With millions at stake in WADA testing, there is an end result to be met. “In my opinion, I was a quota,” says Derosier in Doped: The Dirty Side of Sports.

The myth of the purely human athlete

What WADA is trying to protect is probably a teleological model of an athlete. Unchanged, unadulterated, native human power. A view that was and always will be completely incompatible with top-class sport. From eating testicles to nandrolone, the intent is the same: to find and exceed the limits of human power. If we want athletes to break world records, we can’t do it without technology. What does it mean to be a natural human in an era of genetic modification and transhumanism?

What does it mean to be a natural human in an era of genetic modification and transhumanism?

“World record” by Yoshiaki Kawajiri on The Animatrix

Not to say that we should strive for a return to state-sponsored doping in the GDR, in which athletes at the age of eight were given steroids against their will. Instead, move towards harm reduction and setting science-based risk levels, then test this out. We cannot say that the line between improvement and therapy is clear. If it is not an unfair advantage for baseball players to undergo LASIK surgery to correct vision beyond 20/20, why is it cannabis?

The war on drugs, and later the war on doping, is a war on human nature.

Sha’carri Richardson takes a deep breath in her Today interview. “Don’t judge me for being human. I am you. I just run a little faster. “